Your Opinion: Retain existing trash service

Your Opinion: Retain existing trash service

March 13th, 2011by Jenny Smith, Jefferson City
in News

Dear Editor:

Proposition A will appear on the April 5 ballot. If passed it would repeal Jefferson City's current trash service contract with Allied Waste for curbside recycling. Do you want your trash service rate to increase? Do you want to negotiate your own contract with the waste disposal services as an individual rather than benefit from the low group rate the city has negotiated for us? Do you want to have the city in litigation with potential legal expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for breach of contract?

There is a small but vocal group who managed to get this ill-conceived Proposition A before city voters. They want to drag us backwards. They suggest we should be able to go back to the cheap bags. This will never happen. Allied waste was phasing out the bag service in 2009, which is what prompted the current contract with them.

The anti-trash people also rant about the mandate that requires all residents to pay for trash service. Is this so they can go back to dumping their trash in someone else's bins? Or on the family farm? Or piling it up all year long and waiting to put it all in the free spring cleanup?

Citizens need trash service and it should be considered a basic public service, just like water, sewer, fire and police protection. It is a sanitation issue also. Do they expect this should be free? Our current rate of about $15/month is the envy of many communities. The county residents pay as much as $25/month and do not get the curbside recycling. Osage Beach residents pay about $30/month (also without curbside recycling).

I have not even mentioned the success of the current program; in 2010 there was a seven-fold increase in recycling. This amounted to 2,541 tons less garbage dumped in our landfill.

I do not want to pay more for less service and see an accelerated burden on our landfill.

I will be voting no on Proposition A to save our current cheap and effective trash contract.